Friday, January 25, 2013

Trending Sales (i.e. It's WORKING)

When I launched my first eBook Got Ghosts? Real Stories of Paranormal Activity - I had no idea what to expect. It was my first "test" and I pushed really hard to get it out so it would be there in time for Halloween. It sat for the whole month of October and it did pretty good.

I made $54 bucks for just having one book out with little marketing. After October, I figured the roller coaster ride would come to a stop and I would have little to no sales. I was wrong. I made about $75 bucks in November. Okay, still not convinced it's a trend. In December, I decided to be nice and give my book away for FREE on all days - CHRISTMAS & NEW YEARS.

Wait, WHA?

I know, I know. Believe it or not, even with me giving it away, I made $105 bucks in December.!!! I'm like WOW. So I decided to launch the follow up book - Got Ghosts 2 - More Stories of Real Paranormal Activity and now that it's almost the end of January, I can safely say I'm already at $214 bucks!!! Crazy huh?

However, my fantasy book - Anica Storm & The Wand of Time is stagnant. It's not moving at all. Nix, Nada. It's not that it sucks... it's just not attracting people to buy it. I've tweaked the description, the cover, the title, and the categories and it's just sitting there like an Anvil.

The target audience I'm aiming at (Teens) ~ the beta readers all LOVED it so this is teaching me a valuable lesson, even though I don't want to be learning this lesson (I want to be selling because I think this book has a lot of potential.) The lesson is...

PATIENCE.

I'm 5 months into this journey with 4 books out (soon to be 5) and my two Got Ghosts are on FIRE and my fantasy book is idle. I've read that some books will sit and collect dust until one day *BOOM* straight to the moon in sales. I've seen it with others so it maybe possible. I'm going to look into maybe hiring a professional cover artist for that book and maybe hire professional book description writers too. We'll see.

But the point of this blog is that this journey I'm on is starting to become a reality. It's working but I need to keep at it. I'm still dependent on my day job but hopefully I'll sell enough books that I can stay home and write for a living. Wouldn't that be nice. :-)

If you're a fellow writer, like me, hang in there. It's going to take a lot of work. Keep chipping away at it, one day at a time. It's going to happen. I see the numbers. It's working. Every year, 80 MILLION people are born on this planet. There's enough demand for our books for all of us to share in the piece of the pie. Let my numbers inspire you. :-)